About our client
The County of Lambton is an upper-tier municipal government located in southwestern Ontario, Canada. Lambton encompasses 11 local municipalities and is responsible for providing a wide range of services to its residents related to social services, health services, cultural services and infrastructure.
The challenge
In 2023-2024, Lambton County’s Building Services Department started to investigate options to digitize their records in order to make them more accessible to staff working on-site, remote or in a hybrid environment. A major challenge for the County was the large physical volume of records, as there were over 500 bankers’ boxes of paper records eligible for digitization, some pre-dating 1950. The paper sizes and paper quality varied significantly throughout the collection so it was understood the digitization process would require different types of equipment to capture all of the varying record types – an experienced vendor would be critical to the success of the digitization initiative.
The amount of floorspace being used to store these important records and the risk of damage or loss due to unforeseen events (fire or flooding) further highlighted the need for the records to be stored in a secure, reliable digital solution, so they can be properly backed up and maintained permanently.
To help digitize the significant volume of historical records, the County of Lambton completed a competitive bidding process to identify a partner with the expertise and security infrastructure to complete the project.
The solution
Following a competitive bidding process, Image Advantage, a division of Octacom, was the successful proponent to become the County’s digitization partner, tasked with the secure digitization of over 500 bankers’ boxes of hard copy files. All digital files were to be delivered to the County post scanning so they could be integrated into the Building Services Departments existing digital repository.
Image Advantage’s full-service solution included the following components:
- Strategic Scoping: Collaborated with County of Lambton staff to identify appropriate naming conventions for quick retrieval of the digital files
- Secure Transportation: Image Advantage used our own staff and vehicle to securely pickup the documents and deliver them to our facility for digitization
- Document Preparation: Performed detailed prep including staple removal, document repair and sorting
- Digitization: Scanned documents of varying formats, quality and sizes into searchable PDF files using Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
- Indexing and Output Delivery: Ensured all digital files were correctly named for staff searching and retrieval
- Secure Document Destruction: Provided shredding services for physical records post-digitization, freeing up valuable office space
The results
At the completion of this project, the County of Lambton’s Building Services Department was able to easily search for and access any of the records instantly. Records that were often time consuming to locate or were stored in different buildings, are now available to staff within seconds regardless of their location. Floorspace that was previously used for filing cabinets has been repurposed, and with the records now in digital format, they can be properly backed up to prevent any loss of information.
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